


Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Utopia (TV 2013)
Genre: Angst, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Other, forgotten things and fractured selves and finding them again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-29 23:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14483790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: What if Philip Carvel was a man even more lost than he thought? What if the Doctor was lost and didn't even know it?





	Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer

Call one thing another’s name long enough,  
it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.  
Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened.  
Call what branching happened a man  
whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.  
Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,  
to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.  
Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.  
\--Jane Hirshfield, "Seawater Stiffens Cloth"

 

The man, Philip Carvel

\--he calls himself Philip Carvel--

knows that something has gone very wrong. 

Homer had gone on and on about that legend, but it wasn’t until the need for a delivery mechanism arose that love of a horse became relevant. 

on and on (he’d attended raptly in places and tuned the poet out entirely in others because not all the hours were equally accurate, and he preferred the ones that came short of the second)

He’s lost something important, and he’s not himself, and he thinks that if he could only become himself again he’ll find it, and if he could only find the thing he’s lost, he’ll be himself again. Philip-- _he who is fond of horses_ \--(Carvel) knows that something has gone wrong.

This thing that he has lost, it was very small, and very beautiful, like an idea flitting through his mind don’t catch it! or it’ll dart away dissipate as though it had never been, Nabokov used a net maybe he should too, and he needs it to have been

needs it to exist in the world of him and apart of him, from.

And it’s persistent, it’s stronger than his mind, out there running through the world a wind you feel when you’re far enough from the blast remembering it like a girl--

years after the universe began you can trace that first moment in the background radiation. This is a wind that will blow forever. He’s seen it. Also it’s right there in the maths, which is a kind of seeing you do with your imagination

\--and blowing through his mind, sand through his mind, ground sharp hot particles of glass and shell and limestone through white and grey matter (like fresh cheese in brinestiff cloth he’s a boy trying to pick it up with his hands and they sweep right through), sand gritty between the fingers, hell on the mucous membranes, an attack on the senses. 

He’d swallow this sand, for her.

He’d swallow glass, and blow it out again, form a molten golden sphere with the breath of his own lungs, speckled with the secrets of blood; he would shatter with that light, spill from every part of him until he lay in three thousand million, in twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, thirteen, four fragments, two. Silver-backed, mirrors to stare out of. 

He looks in the mirror. Philip Carvel’s eyes are blue. Philip Carvel’s hair is stringy and a little too much like cobwebs left hanging. Butterfly shards of thought like barrettes in dark hair are too gaudy to survive like moths and too tenacious to pick out.

They lay their eggs in him and die. 

There’s someone in the mirror. Philip, he calls himself Philip. When he was a boy he wasn’t Philip and yesterday he was Mark Deyn and the day before that he was a patient and had a number

_Have you ever been in a genocide?_

They’re going to save the world.

Something has gone very wrong, and he has to leave this place and set it right, and 

(he has to find her)

by the time you read this, Philip Carvel will be gone, Marko will be gone, the boy hiding will be gone with his drawings and his ciphers, with his pages and his spreadsheets, with his sequences and his translations. This is volume three. 

A god with more than one face, a secret genocide that doesn’t make choices, an inactive protein benignly waiting on a single amino acid: these are risible ideas.

He was forever simplifying the details for that girl. She was forever changing the world for him. There are human complexities he could never manage, enormities of social relation that eluded him. She fixed it so that he could exist in a body that died in a camp thirty years ago, hid him in flesh; he’s her Pygmalian, carved out of plasma and memory. Speak, and she turns his thoughts into words, words like actions, narrative acts, spelling the future with a wobbling alphabet of five and twenty-one.

Who are these people she gathers around him, who are these insects she coaxes out of air and returns to ether, sets them with pins carefully arranging their wings, a girl making fairy pictures? They’re laureates anointed by Sweden--Marko is not, after all, a Dane and Norway averts her eyes, out sick that day--and he is their altar god 

they don’t know his name it is a secret it was on their lips two thousand years

vine leaves in his hair

dry leaves like silver on a silver chain coiled and delicate in the palm of his hand. This chain he gives to Brosca when she tells him she is pregnant but the double strand of beaded silver twisting densely in his brain belongs to the one who forged it link by painstaking link on long reams of paper over months or over years and in one night to the smell of polished wood and champagne and money. And the chain around his heart is a wound wound tight by tiny fingers and that’s the secret chain.

It’s a war waged beneath the skin, below the belt, beyond the liar.

Apollo is not the sort of god you sacrifice. And Dionysus’ ichor, arbor-grown, she threw out with the bathwater. Philip’s blood is full of mysteries.

Philip’s blood is rabbit’s blood, mute blood, spilt blood, split blood

chosen blood; he’s a fucking god. There’s no one to stop him choosing. She won’t, she’s his consort, she worships him and the world will worship him in secret through her, walking the earth on his behalf. He’ll keep her from walking off its edge. When they are together, she’ll look at him with a genocide in her eyes and he’ll be reminded of what he’s lost.

Blood is just seawater, we’re all just information in the end. The human species is an extravagantly lifelike storage medium. Malaria’s the more elegant construct. Malaria’s obligations are the sickle, not the scythe. Leave malaria alone. 

Philip’s loves were ever synnecrotic. This is something she has always understood. 

She should never have let him have the baby, any more than he should have let Pietre have his rabbits. 

He fell in love, and just like Pietre, didn’t know what to do with that soft and precious thing, except like Pietre to mime the behaviour that had made him feel, mimickry so convincing it overwhelmed the bewildered grey grief of his life without it.

She’s carrier, memory, continuity. She’s the selfish gene in the daughter cell. She’s his secrets whispering eternities she’s a photograph and there are photographs on the walls in the photograph, there’s a train and a mountain with snow on it and a recombinatorial machine that forges people from a mass of bones.

...he asked her once wouldn’t she rather destroy the world than save it, and she said we’re saving the world by destroying it I was in pain and you showed me a solution and I wanted to give you something in return, the only thing I had. Here is my world, take it, they gave it to me but I never wanted it until you saw it, saw the way it was broken and loved enough the way it could be to try to remake it. He said we could run away she said no we have to stay here we’re responsible for the things we love (and she’d seen what escape could do) and then to demonstrate she’d drowned the love in her that made her weak but he couldn’t do that he was never so stern with himself and he’d been told she loved his brain but he himself loved his heart and he hid his heart in Jessica because his ideas were powerful but never as strong as her terrifying will and he needed to choose he needed to be selfish and the thought of a random lottery was an abomination...

He’s good at escape, so off he runs, old man’s bones slow now how stupid to be bent and bowed shuffling onto someone else’s figures. White dust on the flat dark starry slate, streaks of smeared numbers. The transcription’s all right, but the translation’s all wrong

his greatest work is trapped in his mind because they can’t see it

his greatest work is his mind is where is

Jessica Hyde

?

time is running out he saw it on the telly, it’s brilliant the bright yellow glow there’s a cat on a robot--is it some kind of cyborg? they’re saying viral 

men are killing for no explicable reason men do this every day, they’re so afraid, but this is out of control, she’s lost out there

You’re all going to die!

his solution doesn’t work--something has gone very wrong--the man, Anton--

(it’s as good a name as any)

has seen species rip each other apart, and would rather not see it again. Foolishly, he thought to engineer a change, a bit of code carried on a scrap of nucleic acids that, set loose on the world, would restrict fertility, nothing more. A species can survive that. No suffering, no burning, no mass graves like middens, only an old age without children. But reproductive limits would rewrite humanity through a bottleneck effect, so he decided that this new founder population should be an improvement on the one that had so devastated the planet once already. He decided, further, that he should choose the improvements. Agriculturalists had done the same since before history, before civilisation--it could be argued to constitute civilisation itself, the engineering of the species through manipulation of its environment and the restriction of reproductive success

why shouldn’t he?

Because that’s not who we are.

Isn’t it? Isn’t it who he is? Who Philip Carvel is? Who is Philip Carvel?

Who, for that matter, who the fuck is Milner?

Pietre’s grown into a disturbed boy. Pietre wants to kill things. Pietre wants to be loved. Jessica is tall and angular and yearning. Jessica wants to be loved. They’re looking at him like he’s going to save them.

Milner’s changed. He wouldn’t have believed how easy it could be to see how life on this Earth shapes a person, forces them into forms they don’t fit. Stochastic events throughout the lifecycle influence phenotypic expression, alter the proteome. Miniscule chances, meaningless choices, momentous ones. Starvations of the body and spirit make Lamarckian marks as splatters of ink that seep through page upon page. There was so much they didn't know. So much they worked out on paper, in dark rooms, because they were brilliant and the world was not. Now they've caught up, mindlessly. Does he see his imprint on it at all, or did it all happen without him, while he lay in hiding? Her faith in him is unnerving. He watches her rewrite her worldview in realtime reaction to his inputs. She’s recoded the world in his absence, walking it. Spinning out an outdated revolution.

A train stops below a mountain. Butterflies like ash flake snow from the sky. A crop duster passes by overhead, leaking gas and aerosolised thought. Radiation is only one of many things that transform you. She’s the wild type; he’s been copied over so many times, sequences of him have twisted and blebbed off, proofread into missense.

she falls.

He hears the shot after, as though on a delay. Thunder long after lightning. A woman in a black evening gown, her hair fire in autumn (a blast of heat from an open oven) held back by diamonds like droplets of water frozen in time (or is it droplets of time frozen in water?) steps from the perfect smooth top of a table over an elegant wooden railing, and there is nothing below her but air. Space. Starlight, cold like theory; an emptiness. 

\--hands in dark gloves, hand in hand, a hand tugging on his as they run, urgent, to, no, from--

she’s weightless. In his arms, her body is the body of a dead bird and also that of an old woman who has waited too long as he has waited too long all hollow and brittle and yellow but he’s lost the important thing.

 _No, no, you haven’t!_ , a voice whispers, and he can hear Jessica’s blood rushing through the channels of her arteries with each contraction of her heart pumping fast in her chest like it’s his own.

This is wrong, Milner’s supposed to open eyes in the second face, the noh mask tilted, eyes askance in the light. This is wrong, and this is familiar. Milner’s drowned her love for love of him. She hid her love in a bottle and then she smashed it, and he is certain they were meant to break out of those lamps together, but now all he has are glass shards. They slice his fingers as he holds her, but her blood drowns the earth, golden-bright and lurid and hot. 

He turns on Jessica, who is, he can tell because he can sense it, like scents on subatomic currents, suddenly afraid. He turns _to_ Jessica: hide, hidden, midden, like the thing you wait in, you wait and watch in, you wait in it and watch as bodies are split open and out spill blackbirds, and you can shoot them, four and twenty, down down out of the sky and into your hearts, paired and tripletted, coded, codoned, cordoned.

But Pietre had it wrong, Milner had it wrong: it isn't like the rabbits. Not Jessica. Not his Jessica. His secret. His secret self. His secret’s safe. 

Milner forgot her secret. Milner liked it too much, the mask, the pretense, their construct. She cut the thread threading the maze; she let it unravel, she let it rot. She made her trail with breadcrumbs. She wove the Minotaur from a perfect moon-pale bull, slew it, exiled herself on Naxos, sleeping. Milner, model for the story and Milner, modeled on the story, Milner, left behind because she wouldn't follow, and he wouldn't turn around. She believed in this life’s work, their walked labyrinth, deep in the Earth, circles and lines in circles. She was committed.

He had been committed.

He was less committed than she was, and now it's too late (it was always too late); she has been, and now he's broken out. She’s died and died, in the bath and by the bullet, essence and vessel, a repetition and a re-combination like a rendering flash that leaves a shadow and lights his way out.

How like her to fall for a genocide.

The man, who is--let’s face it-- _not_ Philip Carvel; there is no Philip Carvel, not anymore; bathes himself in yellow light, as he might have painted himself with the ochre of mutagenic crop-dust, and heals the rift that had made them feel so separate. He can make things right, now. Jessica's been found, at last. He's found himself. What once was lost can be embraced. This scarred world, saved.

Other worlds, mortally wounded, have been saved since and before. A billion trillion stars still sing in the sky. Sleepers, wake; he is come.

He picks up the woman’s hollow, so very human body. She’ll leave no trace here. It was they who had had it wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> A kind of a long time ago, some of us were having an amazing Utopia watch along. Uozlulu and Nateobite got to talking with me about a Doctor Who fusion bunny. This turned into the fic I write when I'm in a certain mood, when the words come and I've needed the words but they've come out in shards. It's not an easy read but I love it and I'm frightened of it and I want to share it.


End file.
